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Web censorship plan heads towards a dead end

The Government's plan to introduce mandatory internet censorship
has effectively been scuttled, following an independent senator's
decision to join the Greens and Opposition in blocking any
legislation required to get the scheme started.

The Opposition's communications spokesman Nick Minchin has this
week obtained independent legal advice saying that if the
Government is to pursue a mandatory filtering regime "legislation
of some sort will almost certainly be required".

Senator Nick Xenophon previously indicated he may support a
filter that blocks online gambling websites but in a phone
interview today he withdrew all support, saying "the more evidence
that's come out, the more questions there are on this".

The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has consistently
ignored advice from a host of technical experts saying the filters
would slow the internet, block legitimate sites, be easily bypassed
and fall short of capturing all of the nasty content available
online.

Despite this, he is pushing ahead with trials of the scheme
using six ISPs - Primus, Tech 2U, Webshield, OMNIconnect, Netforce
and Highway 1.

But even the trials have been heavily discredited, with experts
saying the lack of involvement from the three largest ISPs,
Telstra, Optus and iiNet, means the trials will not provide much
useful data on the effects of internet filtering in the
real-world.

Senator Conroy originally pitched the filters as a way to block
child porn but - as ISPs, technical experts and many web users
feared - the targets have been broadened significantly since
then.

ACMA's secret blacklist, which will form the basis of the
mandatory censorship regime, contains 1370 sites, only 674 of which
relate to depictions of children under 18. A significant portion -
506 sites - would be classified R18+ and X18+, which is legal to
view but would be blocked for everyone under the proposal.

This week Senator Conroy said there was "a very strong case for
blocking" other legal content that has been "refused
classification". According to the classification code, this
includes sites depicting drug use, crime, sex, cruelty, violence or
"revolting and abhorrent phenomena" that "offend against the
standards of morality".

And last month, ACMA added an anti-abortion website to its
blacklist because it showed photographs of what appears to be
aborted foetuses. The Government has said it was considering
expanding the blacklist to 10,000 sites and beyond.

Xenophon said instead of implementing a blanket mandatory
censorship regime the Government should instead put the money
towards educating parents on how to supervise their kids online and
tackling "pedophiles through cracking open those peer-to-peer
groups".

Technical experts have said the filters proposed by the
Government would do nothing to block child porn being transferred
on encrypted peer-to-peer networks.

"I'm very skeptical that the Government is going down the best
path on this," said Xenophon.

"I commend their intentions but I think the implementation of
this could almost be counter-productive and I think the money could
be better spent."

The policy has attracted opposition from online consumers, lobby
groups, ISPs, network administrators, some children's welfare
groups, the Opposition, the Greens, NSW Young Labor and even the
conservative Liberal senator Cory Bernardi, who famously tried to
censor the chef Gordon Ramsay's swearing on television.

This week, a national telephone poll of 1100 people, conducted
by Galaxy and commissioned by online activist group GetUp, found
that only 5 per cent of Australians want ISPs to be responsible for
protecting children online and only 4 per cent want Government to
have this responsibility.

A recent survey by Netspace of 10,000 of the ISP's customers
found 61 per cent strongly opposed mandatory internet filtering
with only 6.3 per cent strongly agreeing with the policy.

Even Labor has previously opposed ISP-level internet filtering
when the Howard Government raised it as a method for protecting
kids online.

"Unfortunately, such a short memory regarding the debate in 1999
about internet content has led the coalition to already offer
support for greater censorship by actively considering proposals
for unworkable, quick fixes that involve filtering the internet at
the ISP level," Labor Senator Kate Lundy said in 2003.